Lesson 10: Using TRIZ for Innovation (NASA Engineering and Safety Center Academy, 2011)

TRIZ was built from a reading of patent literature. Its claim is that good solutions repeat, that the ways an engineer resolves a contradiction can be written down and looked up. The deck writes them down: forty numbered principles running from "Segmentation" and "Local quality" through "Convert harm into benefit" and "Flexible membranes/shells or thin film," with a matrix for finding which ones apply to a given conflict between engineering parameters.

The forty principles are surrounded by the vocabulary of a training seminar. A slide of dictionary definitions covers "innovation" and "creative," down to the noun sense, "the creatives in the advertising department." The creative mindset gets its own list: suspend judgment, persistency, an open mind that avoids "not invented here." A sub-bullet under "thinking out of the box" revises the phrase to "increase the size of the box." A two-column slide sets the old way of working, with contradictions hidden and compromise the outcome, against the new one, where contradictions are clarified.